Hydrate Water Tracker

Ch Umamaheshwar — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 04:40:03 +0000

💧 Hydrate Water Tracker

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

I built Hydrate Water Tracker, a simple web application designed to help my friend remember to drink enough water throughout the day.

The idea came from a very simple problem: when you're busy studying, working, or spending hours at your computer, it's surprisingly easy to forget to drink water.

Hydrate keeps the experience simple. You can:

💧 Track how many glasses of water you've had today
🎯 Set and track a daily hydration goal
➕ Add a glass whenever you drink water
➖ Remove a glass if you accidentally add one
🔄 Automatically reset your daily count
⏰ Enable customizable water-drinking reminders
🎉 Get a celebration when you reach your daily goal

The goal was to make something that takes only a few seconds to use rather than creating another complicated health-tracking app.

Demo

🌐 Live Demo: https://maheshwar247.github.io/hydrate-water-tracker/

Code

💻 GitHub Repository:
https://github.com/Maheshwar247/hydrate-water-tracker

How I Built It

The most important part of this project is how it was built.

For this challenge, I wanted to experiment with building an application primarily through an open-source AI model rather than relying on a closed AI API.

I used Hermes as my AI coding agent, powered by the Qwen3.5:4B open-weight model running locally.

The development process involved giving Hermes the project requirements, iterating on the application, testing the results, identifying issues, and asking the agent to improve the implementation.

The application itself is a lightweight web app built with:

HTML
CSS
JavaScript
Qwen3.5:4B
Hermes

I chose a relatively small model because I wanted to see how capable an open model could be for building a complete, useful application rather than simply using the largest available model.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

This project is a good example of why open models matter.

As a student, being able to run an open model locally means I can experiment with AI-assisted development without depending entirely on a proprietary API or paying for every interaction.

Using Qwen3.5:4B through Hermes also gave me the opportunity to actually work with an open model as part of my development workflow.

The project wasn't about asking AI to generate one piece of code and calling it finished. It was about using an open model as an interactive development partner — giving it requirements, reviewing what it produced, testing the application, and iterating on the result.

Open models make this kind of experimentation much more accessible to students and independent developers.

What I Learned

Building Hydrate Water Tracker taught me that a small idea can still become a useful project when you focus on solving a real problem.

More importantly, this was my first opportunity to seriously experiment with open models as part of the software development process.

Using Hermes with Qwen3.5:4B helped me understand how an AI agent can be used not just for answering coding questions, but for iterating on an entire application.

I'm still learning and improving my development skills, so this project was also an experiment in understanding where an open model can help, where I still need to make the decisions myself, and how much can actually be built with a relatively small open model.

DEV Community: Ch Umamaheshwar

Hydrate Water Tracker